Lugné-Poe

Aurélien-Marie Lugné, known by his stage and pen name Lugné-Poe, was a French actor, theatre director, and scenic designer. He founded the landmark Paris theatre company, the Théâtre de l'Œuvre, which produced experimental work by French Symbolist writers and painters at the end of the nineteenth century. Like his contemporary, theatre pioneer André Antoine, he gave the French premieres of works by the leading Scandinavian playwrights Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson.

Early career

In 1887, at age 17, Lugné-Poe and friend Georges Bourdon created an amateur theatre group called le Cercle des Escholiers, which sought to perform "unpublished or, at the very least, little-known works." As he prepared to audition for the Paris Conservatory, he changed his name from Lugné to "Lugné-Poe" in homage to Edgar Allan Poe. While the Conservatory rejected his audition in fall 1887, they accepted him in fall 1888; days later he joined André Antoine's Théâtre Libre, a subscriber-based Naturalist independent theatre. After appearing in the first play of that season under his own name, Lugné-Poe adopted the stage names "Philippon," "Delorme," and "Leroy" for the duration of his association with Antoine's company.
Lugné-Poe continued acting lessons at the Conservatory under the great Comédie-Française star Gustave Worms while appearing in Théâtre Libre's 1888-1889 season and the first half of the next. But tensions grew over the next year as Antoine bullied and blamed his actors, including Lugné-Poe, for weak performances. After their falling out while on tour in Belgium in early 1890, Lugné-Poe concentrated on his Conservatory competition showcases, winning a First-Place certificate for Comedy in early 1890. His obligation to fulfill military service in the fall, however, suspended his theatrical rise. Before his departure, he had already befriended a group of painters known as The Nabis, and publicized their work in a series of articles.
Returning from an abbreviated military service in early spring 1891, Lugné-Poe joined Paul Fort's Théâtre d'Art, first appearing in Maurice Maeterlinck's L'Intruse. For the next two years, he moved regularly between acting for the Théâtre d'Art and directing for his former company Le Cercle des Escholiers. Lugné-Poe performed in ten plays altogether for Fort, interpreting, most notably, the Maeterlinck rôles of the Old Man in L'Intruse and the First Blind Man in Les Aveugles, as well as Satan in Jules Bois' Les Noces de Sathan. He, along with Georgette Camée, forged the signature Symbolist acting style that conveys a reverie, with its hieratic movement and gestures, matched with solemn, psalmodized line readings. After the disappointing plays of the March 28, 1892 program, Fort called a halt to the Théâtre d'Art. Lugné-Poe put his talents to staging and acting in noteworthy plays with the Cercle des Escholiers, which culminated with Ibsen's The Lady from the Sea. It was only the fourth French-translated Ibsen play to open in Paris, after Antoine's landmark productions of Ghosts in 1890 and The Wild Duck in 1891, and Albert Carré's production of Hedda Gabler in December 1891. When Lugné-Poe reconstituted the Théâtre d'Art as the Théâtre de l'Œuvre in 1893, he would make Ibsen his specialty in Paris theatre, premiering nine Ibsen plays between 1893 and 1897.

Théâtre de l'Œuvre

Like Paul Fort before him, Lugné-Poe never secured a permanent stage for the entire run of his company's initial art-theatre experiment. The Théâtre de l'Œuvre debuted with Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande for a single matinée performance at the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens in May 1893, but the six engagements in his next season occurred at the distant Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, where he premiered Ibsen's Rosmersholm, An Enemy of the People, and The Master Builder, Gerhart Hauptmann's Lonely Lives, and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson's Beyond Human Power, among others. For the May 1894 production of Henri Bataille and Robert d'Humières' Sleeping Beauty, he secured Nouveau-Théâtre's space for the first time. Though he concluded the season with August Strindberg's Creditors at the newly built Comédie-Parisienne, he quickly assumed the directorship of Nouveau-Théâtre for most of the 1894-95 season. There he premiered Maeterlinck's adaptation of John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, Beaubourg's The Mute Voice, Strindberg's The Father, Śūdraka's The Little Clay Cart, and Maeterlinck's Interior, among others. While his May 1895 productions were staged at the Théâtre des Menus-Plaisirs, he returned to Nouveau-Théâtre to conclude the season with Ibsen's Brand.
The 1895-96 season found residence at two locations. Lugné-Poe staged the first half of the season back at the Comédie-Parisienne, with a line-up that included Thomas Otway's Venice Preserved, Kālidāsa's The Ring of Shakuntalā, and Oscar Wilde's Salome.
The second half, however, starting in March 1896, began over two-years' residency for the Théâtre de l'Œuvre at Nouveau-Théâtre. Most notably, they premiered Ibsen's Pillars of Society and Peer Gynt ; Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi ; Bjørnson's sequel to Beyond Human Power ; Hauptmann's fairy drama The Sunken Bell ; Bataille's Your Blood ; Ibsen's Love's Comedy and John Gabriel Borkman ; Nikolai Gogol's The Inspector General ; and Romain Rolland's Aert and The Wolves. For their last season, the Théâtre de l'Œuvre gave two undistinguished premieres—Paul Sonniès' Fausta and Lucien Mayrargue's The Yoke —preferring to hold the much anticipated revival of An Enemy of the People at the grander Théâtre de la Renaissance in February. Lugné-Poe's last productions for the company were done at the very theatre where the Théâtre de l'Œuvre had begun in 1893 with Pelléas et Mélisande: the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens. By the close of the nineteenth century, Lugné-Poe's company had successfully established half a dozen Parisian theatres as sites for daring, challenging, and at times outrageous modern drama.
In 1895, Jakub Grein and the Independent Theatre Society invited Lugné-Poe and his troupe to present a season of Ibsen's Rosmersholm, The Master Builder, and Maurice Maeterlinck's symbolist L'Intruse and Pelléas and Mélisande in London.